Chomp Solver Software is Released

Article type: Research Article

Authors: O’Gorman, Kevin

Affiliations: Arroyo Grande, California, US. [email protected]

Abstract: Chomp is a poset (partially-ordered set) game invented by Gale (1974). Its starting position is a rectangular grid of squares, one corner of which is the special poison square; without loss of generality, we assume it is always in the lower-left corner. Players take turns choosing a square and removing it along with all squares to its right or above it or both. The player who removes the poison square loses the game. This note introduces a solver software for GNU tools on a POSIX system that can solve the game for reasonable starting positions. The software took about 8 days to solve all positions up to the 16x16 square. This software is freely available on SourceForge under the project name Chocoholic. This note describes the software, some things noted about the solution, and some possible future developments.

DOI: 10.3233/ICG-2013-36104

Journal: ICGA Journal, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 37-40, 2013